Termination Shock

T.R. looked back toward his security guys. “I am informed that you can make a small one that ain’t a nuke. Derives its energy from the heat of reentry, which is considerable. Generates the pulse through a thermochemical reaction. Affects a correspondingly smaller footprint on the ground. Surgical. Just the thing for whatever our adversaries have in mind. Whatever that is.”

He turned sideways to listen to a few tense words from a grizzled Black Hat who had strode up behind him. In profile Saskia could see him nodding.

“My fellas,” T.R. said, turning back to face her, “are expressing keen impatience with the easygoing and protracted pace of this conversation. The words ‘sitting duck’ have been used. They would like me—and you, goes without saying—indoors and belowground.”

“I’m happy to do whatever they consider best.” Saskia began closing the distance between them.

“If it weren’t for that damn EMP we would have our pick of hidey-holes. Things being what they are, there is only one reasonable choice. The elevator still has power. It can take us down to places you have seen before, where nothing short of a nuke would trouble us. And let’s face it, if they just wanted to nuke us, they’d have done it. The power is on down there and will remain so. It’s a no-brainer.”

“Lead and I shall follow,” Saskia said.

The Pecan Orchard

Laks’s driver, though not much of a conversationalist, had been the living embodiment of professional competence until around dusk, when he swung the wheel hard left, crossed the road’s oncoming lane, smashed through a barbed-wire fence, and let the rig’s momentum carry it some distance into a pecan orchard. There it rested for only a few moments before all its electronics went dead and the engine stopped running: an event that seemed to coincide with a blinding flash of light in the sky off to the right.

This road ran through country that, for sparseness of population, rivaled the Himalayas. The pecan trees now surrounding them were the only vegetation they’d seen all day more than about the height of a man’s knee. So it seemed like they’d crashed with some degree of privacy. The pecan trees were planted in a grid. The driver had aimed down a lane between rows. Their foliage was thick; someone must have put a lot of money into irrigation. When Laks opened the door and climbed out, he saw no lights except for the stars. The only witnesses to the crash of the truck would have been the men they had passed about three seconds before the driver had swerved. They’d been standing next to a van parked on the shoulder of the road. A very old van, like something from the 1960s. One of the men had, in retrospect, been using a flashlight to cue the driver.

Now that van was approaching, following the rut left in the truck’s wake. Its lights were off and so it was sort of feeling its way along at little more than a walking pace. Too slow, apparently, for the taste of one man sitting in the back. He slid the side door open and alighted, then jogged ahead. Ignoring Laks, who had walked back down the length of the rig to investigate, he made a beeline for the back of the shipping container, clambered up onto the rear bumper, and got busy with a keychain. After a few moments Laks heard the heavy clunk of the massive latch bolts moving and hinges moaning as the doors were swung open.

By now the van had parked about ten meters behind. Its driver turned on the parking lights just long enough for the guy with the keys to step up and punch some numbers on a keypad inside the door. This caused a lot of red LEDs to come on. Once the van’s lamps were extinguished, Laks could see up into a volume forty feet long, eight feet wide, and eight feet high, with just enough of that red glow to let people get a sense of where things were—like the combat lighting on the bridge of a warship. Silhouetted were long racks mounted to the ceiling and to the walls, running the full length of the container. Queued up on those were hundreds of skeletal black shapes that he recognized as drones. They were of more than one size and shape. Some were barely larger than the palm of his hand, others as large as a bicycle. It was difficult to sort it out visually because, as he gradually figured out, there were drones mounted on other drones—mother ships carrying several smaller children. The closest analogy from nature would be a cave in which a large number of bats were sleeping all crammed together, wings folded around them. The wings here were rectangular, creased, and folded like fans: deployable panels of photovoltaic cells.

The van rocked on its suspension as the guy who’d been riding shotgun vaulted up onto its roof. He got down on one knee and unslung a rifle from his shoulder. He laid this gently on the roof, then got into a prone position, his face and the barrel of the weapon both aimed back the way they had come. Not that there was anything approaching from the road; but apparently he intended to keep it that way.